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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25872655">Vera's Genesis</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhodelle16/pseuds/Rhodelle16'>Rhodelle16</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dungeons &amp; Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Dungeons &amp; Dragons - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Backstory, D&amp;D, Tiefling, Violence, Warlock - Freeform, tragic backstory</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 00:42:10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,364</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25872655</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhodelle16/pseuds/Rhodelle16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The backstory of a Tiefling Warlock named Vera.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Vera's Genesis</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Ambrielle Firecrest was born a light grey skinned Tiefling with black hair and dark blue eyes. Her infernal bloodline was passed through the paternal side of her lineage. Her parents, Cymer and Geva led simple lives. Her mother, Geva, was a talented alchemist and worked for an apothecary. Her father, Cymer, was a farmer that worked in a field that produced brewery hops. Gilbert, a friend of Cymer, introduced the couple. It was an unconventional relationship between a Tiefling and a Human, but not illegal by any means. A year after their marriage, Ambrielle was born.</p>
<p>The early years of Ambrielle’s life were ordinary and filled with laughter. Ambrielle was an inquisitive and happy child that was eager to learn. Friendship was occasionally difficult to come by due to her unusual appearance, but for the most part it didn’t bother her. The family lived happily for the first decade of Ambrielle’s life. Both parents were loving and active in her life.</p>
<p>When she was ten, Ambrielle discovered that she had a minute aptitude for magic. She could make objects move without touching them, and on occasion could create a small flame between her fingers. One night, when Cimer was deep in his cups, he bragged about his daughter’s abilities. The next day, a pair of guards and a halfling in a long dark blue robe came to their door.</p>
<p>In Red Hold, magic was forbidden, but they do not slaughter mages on sight. They were instead escorted to an academy north of the city, where they were raised in a controlled environment that allows them to coexist with magic. At least, that’s what people were led to believe. Ambrielle was thrown into a dungeon beneath an old fort.</p>
<p>She was subjected to torture and cruel experiments. Small shards of glass, gems, and other components were embedded into her skin, then removed or replaced. She was cut down to the bone. She was submerged in icy water, scalding water, and nearly drowned. Her torturers dug and scratched and cut their way into and through her in an attempt to foundwhere the magic comes from, and how to harness it. Ambrielle faced the feelings of betrayal by her parents, forgetting that they believed this place to be safe and secure. She cast them out of her mind, leaving them behind.</p>
<p>The jailors that brought Ambrielle to and from her cell were always hooded, hiding their identity, but her torturer never wore a hood. He had crooked nose and sharp, jagged teeth and a wicked smile. What he lacked in height he made up for in menace. There were days when she wished she could not see in the dark. Most days she wished she could just die, but she was not allowed to. Her torturer would bring her to the brink of death, then give her a bitter red potion, and all of her wounds would close again, leaving only scars behind.</p>
<p>A few years later, Ambrielle could hear another child’s crying. In her cell, she crawled closer to the sound, coming through an old drainage pipe in the floor. She called out to them, and found a friend in a young boy. He didn’t remember his name, so she called him Eugene. They had as much of a friendship as they could have through a pipe. Comforting each other and telling each other stories of light and happy days to keep them sane in the wretched place they had been imprisoned in.</p>
<p>A few years went by, more scars were created, more experiments done, more pain inflicted. One day, Eugene was telling Ambrielle about a field of flowers that was near his house. He would play while his sisters braided each other’s hair. His story was cut short by the familiar sound of the cell door slamming open. His screams and pleas were the last she heard of Eugene’s voice.</p>
<p>Ambrielle slowly forgot her name, her parents, her old life, until the only real thing in her life was the torture she experiences. Her life became a blur of blades, potions and darkness. She gave up, no longer fighting her jailors, just waiting until it was over. She considered killing herself, but her cell was empty and devoid of weapons or methods, so she sat against the wall and waited.</p>
<p>One day, after a portion of her bone marrow had been removed, she heard a voice. Not from the pipe, nor from outside the cell door, but within her own ears. <em>“I’m so sorry.”</em> She thought it was a hallucination for a long time but promises to remember the voice. More time passed, and the voice was replaced by the sounds of her screams.</p>
<p>Time continued to pass, though it lost its interval for her. She slowly learned the language the jailors spoke by immersion. A guttural, hissing language. She began her journey into maturity, her menstrual cycle beginning. She was never taught what this meant, and she had hope that she was finally dying. It didn’t last long, though. Her torturer removed her womb a few days after the bleeding began. She became an empty shell again. She ignored the goodberries she was given daily at the cell door, and they accumulate into a small pile.</p>
<p>This was when she heard the voice again. <em>“Get up. Keep going.” </em>The realization that this was the same voice frome a long-forgotten dream startled her. She stood, tucked the berries into a small pocket of stone, and ate two. She slowly built her strength back up.</p>
<p>She heard the voice again quite some time later, after her horns were broken off. <em>“You were strong enough to withstand this.”</em></p>
<p>More time passed. She heard the voice again after her tail was removed. <em>“Survive. Endure.”</em></p>
<p>Her dark hair was cropped short one day, in jagged lines just below her chin. She didn’t ask why. She didn’t see reason in anything that happens anymore. The next day, she was laid face down on a table, wrists and ankles bound, her back exposed. White hot pain filled her as her torturer cut and dug into her upper back. She heard him say the word <em>wings</em> in the coarse language she had learned over her time here. She screamed and cried out for the voice that had told her to survive, vowing her life in exchange for her freedom. Pain ripped through her right eye and she was temporarily blinded.</p>
<p><em>“Enough.”</em> Was what the voice said, but it was no longer inside her head. She turned her head to the sound and saw a lithe, bloodied female body dressed in a loose gossamer gown. The form was headless; a bloody, jagged stump ending the nape of her neck. She was riddled with several visible puncture wounds, and the blood on her dress preludes to more beneath. The figure raised her hand to the torturer, and a beam of energy crackled from her palm, hitting her torturer in the chest and knocking him against a wall.</p>
<p>Her restraints unleashed and the figure helped her off the table. She handed her a rusted sickle, then escorted her through the dungeon, scaring, intimidating, and attacking the jailors as they arose to apprehend their prisoner. The figure brought the traumatized girl to the doors of the fort, and she was given the strength to run. <em>“We will speak again. Run,” </em>the voice told her, and then the figure disappeared.</p>
<p>She looked around, saw a distant tower from a long-forgotten dream, and headed in the opposite direction. She ran for as long as her malnourished form could manage. When she finally collapsed, she found herself next to a roadside pond. She laid down on her back, with her toes in the water, and saw  the stars for the first time in a decade.</p>
<p>This world was foreign, but vaguely familiar. She couldn’t place where she had seen the twinkling specks in the night sky, or the sound of insects chirping in the grass nearby. Her heart filled with apprehension and relief. She was finally free.</p>
<p>She woke to the sound of cart wheels crunching on the nearby gravel. She looked toward the road and saw a covered merchant’s cart pulled by a dark brown horse. A woman with fair skin and tawny hair approached her slowly. It took a moment for her to understand what she was saying. She knew this language once upon a time but hadn’t used it since her friend through the pipe had disappeared.</p>
<p>The woman was concerned, worry etched into her features. She asked for the girl’s name. The girl shook her head, confused and disoriented. The woman placed a hand on her own chest and introduced herself as Faena. She offered a hand to the girl, but she did not take it. She backed up, fell into the pond, and began to panic.</p>
<p>Faena reached out with a light blue sparkling energy and the girl’s emotions calmed. Faena pulled her out of the water and with the touch of her hand, the girl’s wounds closed a bit, and her hair began to turn white at the roots, a byproduct of the residual experiments left in her scars. Faena gently led her to the wagon and lifted her inside. The half-elven woman proved to be a gentle, kind spirit. She tended to the girl’s wounds, fed her, and gave her a safe place to rest her head. After a few days of travel northward, a human man with dark skin and strong features joined them. Faena introduced him as Sebastian, her husband.</p>
<p>The couple sheltered the girl for a few weeks before they began to ask her about her past. The girl explained that she had been in the dark for as long as she could remember, taken to and from the torturer’s room without explanation or interaction. Faena began to call her Vera after the aloe vera they spread on her scars nightly to help healing. She took to this name immediately and began to reform her identity, slowly warming and trusting the couple.</p>
<p>Sebastian, a Rakashi veteran began to train Vera in combat, helping her become familiar with the sickle they had found her with. He was hard on her but was quick to praise her accomplishments and encourage her in times of doubt. Through ancient Rakashi traditions utilizing war cries, intimidation and chanting, Sebastian helped her regain her sense of self, and taught her to channel her trauma through her fighting.</p>
<p>Where Sebastian was the voice of endurance and power, Faena was the voice of gentleness and kindness. At night she braided Vera’s fast-growing hair and taught her using the books she had traded. Vera learned about the world’s history, literature, art and religion. Vera was drawn to the depictions of The Voidwalker; the god of death, who ensured the proper passing of the dead through the void. She was always hungry for information about him, but the books Faena was able to acquire never went into depth.</p>
<p>Vera seldom spoke to the figure that saved her, and for the most part, the figure seemed unbothered by it. She appeared from time to time and gifted Vera an ability in combat or spellcasting. She taught her invocations or reminded her how to use the traits she had acquired naturally. Vera learned how to see better in the dark than she could before, gaining color vision in the night. She also learned how to disguise herself, and this came in handy once they found a wanted poster with Vera’s picture on it. Vera became a wanted fugitive for her escape from the Serpent’s Maw Mage Ward, the place from her worst nightmares. Vera suffered night terrors, and Faena held her every time she woke up screaming. Vera found her home in these people that risked themselves for her. She claimed them as her parents.</p>
<p>Over the course of two years, the three of them traveled around the western side of the Empire, exposing Vera to new cultures and experiences, to which she soaked up and learned like a sponge. For all her ‘shelter’ Vera was extremely intelligent and curious. She became trilingual, learning the Rakashi language, refining the language she learned in the dungeons which she learned was Undercommon, and relearned the common language of the Empire. Vera’s handwriting never improved, but she proved to be adept with a quill or piece of burned wood in sketching and drawing.</p>
<p>One cold night in Skaraj, the wagon was attacked by a hooded figure. The assailant was hyper-focused on Vera, and the three of them quickly surmised it was a bounty hunter out to collect a reward. Sebastian and Vera quickly dispatch the hunter, Sebastian finishing the job, and upon further inspection, they found it was a human female covered in scars similar to Vera’s. Suspicious, she cut into the woman’s arm and found pieces of green glass embedded in her skin, exactly like the ones Faena’s healing magic had purged from Vera’s flesh. Faena and Sebastian disposed of the corpse nearby, concerned only for Vera’s safety.</p>
<p>Three days later, Vera collected a small pack of supplies and coin while the couple was making a trade inside a blacksmith’s shop. She hid it under the front bench and waited for night to fall. She savored the last dinner she ate with them, the normally savory meat leaving a bitter taste in her mouth. She wrote a letter saying only the words “Stay safe. I love you.” She added a small drawing of the aloe vera plant she was named for, cut a length of her hair and tied it around the letter. She fled into the night, biting back her tears.</p>
<p>She disguised herself as a human with beige skin, brown hair and dark brown eyes, and began to take on mercenary work, putting as much distance as possible between herself and her adoptive parents. After rumors of wealth and work in the city of Straeh, Vera found herself on the outskirts, and was handed a letter by an Elven man in well made robes. She opened it to find a summons to Marrowbone Manor, the house of the Noble Adelaide family.</p>
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